Recent years have seen rapid development in real-time provision of digital content to users visiting various media properties (e.g., websites or apps hosted on remote servers). Indeed, due to the increased prevalence of computing devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, or personal computers, individuals and businesses increasingly access a variety of websites seeking digital content, such as news articles, social media posts, games, or digital videos. In response to this increase in user access to media properties, demand has also increased for the opportunity to place digital content on media properties for consumption by individual visitors. For example, when a user visits a website, some systems utilize concurrent advertising systems to place advertising opportunities for sale to third-parties.
Although third-party digital content providers can utilize such concurrent advertising systems to provide digital content to users visiting media properties, these conventional systems have several shortcomings. For example, due to the near-instantaneous nature of concurrent advertising systems, third-party digital content providers have difficulty developing effective and efficient online ad campaigns and judging the efficacy of such online ad campaigns. To illustrate, an advertiser can utilize conventional systems to select an advertisement for an online ad campaign and purchase impression opportunities, but the advertiser remains unaware of the amount of improvement attributable to the online ad campaign. Moreover, the advertiser has difficulty knowing what changes can be made to improve the online ad campaign. These concerns are exacerbated by the nature of concurrent advertising systems, where impression opportunities are purchased for individual users simultaneously accessing websites and where purchasing decisions must be made digitally, within milliseconds, to provide the advertisements to the website visitor (e.g., as the website loads on the visitor's computing device).
Some conventional systems seek to address these problems by performing costly experiments for advertisers. For example, some conventional systems purchase a plurality of ad slots, provide standardized content in the ad slots, and perform an experiment utilizing the standardized content as a baseline. Although this approach can provide an indication of the improvement provided by other advertisements, such experiments are very expensive. Indeed, to perform such an experiment, an advertiser needs to purchase large numbers additional impression opportunities for the standardized content.
Moreover, these experimentation approaches also introduce inefficiencies in conventional concurrent advertising systems. Indeed, as a result of purchasing content for both test advertisements and standardized advertisements, conventional concurrent advertising systems are required to manage unnecessary purchases and provide unnecessary content to users via websites. Accordingly, in addition to imposing costs on advertisers, conventional experimentation systems unnecessarily increase processing and storage demand on systems.
These and other problems exist with regard to conventional advertising experimentation and design systems.